No 10 suggests US would have no justification for trade tariffs on UK and declines to criticise Trump over threats – UK politics live

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Murdo Fraser, business spokesperson for the Scottish Conservatives in Holyrood, says Donald Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on the EU means the SNP plan for an independent Scotland to rejoin the EU is “utter madness”. He has posted this on social media.

When @realDonaldTrump is proposing trade tariffs on the EU but not the UK, it is utter madness for the SNP to be proposing breaking away from rUK in order to join Europe

Britons would prefer PR voting system to first-past-the-post by almost two to one, poll suggests

Britons think a proportional representation voting system would better than first-past-the-post by a margin of almost two to one according to new polling by YouGov.

There is a full write-up here.

Phillipson responds to union attacks on new Ofsted report cards saying children's life chances should be their priority

Bridget Phillipson has said she expects the “first priority” of unions to be “children and their life chances”, after her new proposals for Ofsted inspections were criticised for being worse than the system they would replace, PA Media reports.

The education Secretary said she will “always seek to engage in dialogue” with unions, but she “won’t let anything get in the way” of her responsibility to families and children.

Asked by reporters what her message to unions would be given they have criticised the plans and unhappiness over pay proposals, Phillipson replied:

My first priority is children and their life chances, and that’s what I’d expect their first priority to be as well.

Of course I’ll always seek to engage in dialogue and have a constructive relationship where that’s possible, but my first responsibility as secretary of state is to children and families and to their life chances and I won’t let anything get in the way of that.

Pushed more on whether she was listening to teachers and their concerns, she added:

I think there’s been a lot of discussion about how I as secretary of state am apparently in hock to the trade unions. I think we’ve seen today from the reaction to what we’re setting out that that’s very far from the truth.

I will always seek a constructive relationship with trade unions representing our teachers and workforce, they’ve got an important role to play.

But my first priority will always be children and their life chances. That has to be my focus and that’s my first responsibility.

Here is the full text of Phillipson’s speech, in which she she said the new report cards would provide “rich, granular insight”.

Bridget Phillipson doing at Q&A at the Centre For Social Justice in London today after delivering her speech on standards. Photograph: Lucy North/PA

Badenoch meets Charles as Buckingham Palace revives tradition of audiences with new opposition leaders

Kemi Badenoch has held a one-to-one audience with King Charles – reviving an old convention of the monarch meeting with the new leader of the opposition, PA Media reports. PA says:

Charles welcomed Badenoch in the grand 1844 Room of Buckingham Palace on Monday morning.

Badenoch, who was elected Tory leader in November, was pictured grinning as the smiling king gestured and held his arms out wide at the start of their half-hour meeting.

She is said to be the first opposition leader to have a formal one-to-one audience with a monarch in 19 years.

A royal source said: “It was a convention that fell by the way in latter years of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s reign and seemed a courtesy to revive in the new reign.”

It is not known why the tradition lapsed during Labour’s years in opposition.

The last opposition leader to be welcomed in a formal audience in the months after their appointment was David Cameron, when he met with the late Queen in 2006.

King Charles III holding an audience with leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch at Buckingham Palace. Photograph: Aaron Chown/PA

Starmer should convene Commonwealth summit to organise joint retaliation against US for tariffs on Canada, Lib Dems say

Ed Davey has urged Keir Starmer to invite Commonwealth leaders to a summit in London to discuss coordinated retaliation against the US for the tariffs it has imposed on Canada.

In a statement the Lib Dem leader he said:

We mustn’t let Donald Trump bully the UK or our close ally Canada, who we share a head of state with. Trump’s tariffs on our Commonwealth partner are a shocking way to treat a country that stood alongside both the US and the UK during the second world war.

We need to work with our allies in the Commonwealth and Europe to stand strong against Trump and remind him that we are America’s longest standing friends. So the prime minister should invite Commonwealth leaders to London as soon as he returns from Brussels, to discuss a joint response to the global trade war Trump is unleashing.

Donald Trump is acting like a playground bully and is trying to play our allies off against each other. We must stand together against his attempts to divide us. Only by showing our combined strength can we persuade the president to behave properly with America’s friends.

The British government can’t just sit back and hope Trump won’t hit us with tariffs directly. He’s proven time and again how unpredictable he is and our economy will be hurt by this trade war anyway, which will push up prices for families in the UK.

Judging by what was said at the Downing Street lobby briefing earlier (see 12.41pm), the chances of Starmer agreeing to this are about zero.

No 10 says PM 'focused on delivering' in response to questions about damning quotes in new Starmer book

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson was also asked if Keir Starmer was happy about reports saying that he was seen by colleagues as HR manager, or someone who was not driving the train.

These were references to two of the most striking quotes in the extracts from Get In, a new book about Starmer’s rise to power by the Times columnist Patrick Maguire and the Sunday Times Whitehall editor Gabriel Pogrund published in the Sunday Times yesterday. The HR manager one was quoted at 11.53am. The train quote is here, attributed to an unnamed Labour insider speaking in the early phase of Starmer’s leadership.

Occasionally they even spoke of their leader as if he were a useful idiot. Said one, referring to the driverless Docklands Light Railway that wound its way through east London: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”

Asked about these comments, the spokesperson said it was not for him to comment on what Starmer was doing when he was in opposition. But he also said:

The prime minister is focused on delivering the plan for change and delivering on the priorities for the British people … this government was elected on a mandate to change the country and put people’s priorities at the heart of delivering that’s why the prime minister’s focused on getting on with the job.

Asked if Starmer was right to designate his voice coach a key worker during Covid, the spokesperson said he could not comment on what Labour did in opposition. Asked if the PM would designate voice coaches as key workers in the event of a future pandemic, the spokesperson said that was a hypothetic question.

But the spokesperson did say, as far was he was aware, Starmer has not used a voice coach since he has been PM.

No 10 sides with Denmark over Greenland – but declines to criticise Trump's threats, saying they're 'hypothetical'

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson was also asked about president Trump’s desire to buy Greenland from Denmark, and his threats impose sanctions on Denmark if it refuses to cooperate. The spokesperson seemed anxious to say as little as possible on the subject. He said that the UK’s “longstanding on Denmark and Greenland” (ie support for the status quo, and self-determination) was “well understood”. But, with reference to the US, he said he would not get into “hypothetical situations”.

Asked if the Nato article 5 guarantees would apply to Denmark, which could mean the UK and other Nato members help the Danish fight off an invasion (at one press conference Trump refused to rule out using military force to take Greenland), the spokesperson just repeated the line about not getting into hypothetical situations.

No 10 says UK has 'fair and balanced' trading relationship with US, implying Trump has no justification for tariffs

Downing Street has inisted that the UK’s trade relationship with the US is “fair”. At the morning lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson would not criticise Donald Trump for suggesting yesterday that the UK’s trade relationship with the US is unbalanced. (See 9.34am.) Trump has hinted that he may impose tariffs on British imports, and he suggested that by implying that current trade arrangments are unbalanced (ie, the UK is selling more to the US than it is buying). But the spokesperson did defend the current trading relationship.

Here are the key points from the briefing on trade matters.

• The spokesperson insisted that the US gets a fair deal from trade with the UK. He said:

From our part, the US is indispensable ally. It’s one of our closest trading partners. We’ve got a fair and balanced trading relationship which benefits both sides of the Atlantic. It’s worth about £300bn, and we are each other’s single largest investors, with £1.2tn invested in each other’s economies.

And we look forward to working with President Trump and the new US administration to build on UK us trading relations to benefit of both our economies …

We’re committed to free and open trade. We have a strong UK-US trade relationship, and as we said before, we look forward to working with President Trump to continue to build on the trading relations support so many jobs, no ties as the Atlanta has.

As the Financial Times reports, whether or not the UK has an overall trade surplus with the US depends on whether you look at US statistics or UK statistics.

• The spokesperson said Starmer believed Trump was someone he could trust. Asked if Starmer thought the president was someone who would keep his word, the spokesperson replied:

Yes, the prime minister has had a really constructive early set of conversations with president Trump, and looks forward to working with him to deepen our trade, investment, security and defence relationship.

• The spokesperson ducked questions about whether the government was confident the UK would avoid tariffs.

• The spokesperson would not say whether the UK would retaliate if Trump imposes tariffs on the UK by imposing tariffs of its own on US imports.

• The spokesperson dismissed suggestions that the UK might intervene to help Canada in its trade war with the US. Asked about possible intervention to help Canada, an ally, the spokesperson said he would not comment on other countries’ trade relations, and he stressed the strength of the UK-US trade relationship.

• The spokesperson said Starmer’s relationship with Trump was “constructive”. He used the term when asked if Starmer agreed with Trump’s claim that Starmer had been “very nice” to him.

The National Education Union has criticised Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary (for England – because education is devolved) for ignoring the impact of cuts in her speech this morning. Daniel Kedebe, the NEU general secretary, said:

There is an elephant in the room here.

The secretary of state is talking today about urging the education system to achieve more. At the same time, this Government is gearing up to make cuts to education, and to the other services which students need to remove barriers to their learning.

Sir Keir Starmer will be the first Labour prime minister since James Callaghan to tell schools to make cuts. He fudges this by calling them ‘efficiencies’, but they amount to reducing what schools require to meet their students’ needs properly.

And, restating his opposition to the new school report card system proposed for Ofsted, Kedebe said:

Pigs don’t get fatter as a result of weighing them more often. It’s not inspection that delivers excellence – it’s well supported, experienced leaders and education professionals – and it is investment. It’s a motivated, well valued workforce with great CPD [continuting professional development].

Using negative, pejorative terms like ‘stuck schools’ is unhelpful and counter-productive. Collaboration and not ranking is what builds a good local school for every child.

Quite simply you cannot have an improving school system whilst you are implementing austerity.

Starmer changed personal email after suspected Russian hack in 2022, new book reveals

Keir Starmer was forced to change his personal email account in 2022 after the security services investigated a ­suspected Russian hack, the Times reports today.

It is the latest story from Get In, a new book about Starmer’s rise to power and his early days in No 10, by the Times columnist Patrick Maguire and the Sunday Times Whitehall editor Gabriel Pogrund.

Describing what happened to Starmer, Maguire and Pogrund report:

Jill Cuthbertson, his head of office, circulated a note without explanation instructing staff not to email Starmer under any circumstances.

Starmer subsequently changed his email address, which a source said had been “dangerously obvious”, and added two-factor authentication, a fail-safe under which users can access an ­account only after passing two security checks …

Senior advisers from the Labour leader’s office were briefed on the hack at the National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ.

Starmer was told that his personal email may have been hacked. Although there was no evidence that emails had been published, the services could not guarantee that sensitive information had not been stolen.

The book contains a series of other revelations, some of them embarrassing, which have been published in the Times and the Sunday Times. They include:

• Morgan McSweeney, who is now Starmer’s chief of staff, privately doubted whether Starmer was capable of being an effective leader in the early days after he took over Labour, the book says. In an extract published yesterday, the authors say:

To a tiny circle of trusted friends, McSweeney later wondered aloud whether his boss was strong enough to weather the storm that engulfed his office in 2021. He had often referred contemptuously to some MPs as members of “librarian Labour”. Too many of them, he felt, seemed drawn to the quiet life: unprepared to confront the Corbynite left and with it existential questions about Labour’s purpose.

At times, McSweeney wondered if even Starmer was a librarian. In private he voiced his fears that his principal might be too timid. The leader was prepared to work with people who either did not understand the urgency of the change required, or appeared inclined to sabotage it.

He told one friend in the early phase of Starmer’s leadership: “Keir’s very bright and picks things up very fast. He’s not completely unpolitical. He has some sense of skulduggery. But not like these people. Angela is political all the time, she manipulates people … All of her people come from Unite. Keir doesn’t realise these are people he cannot do business with.” To another, McSweeney was openly fatalistic, questioning his boss’s lack of politics: “Keir acts like an HR manager, not a leader. What’s the point of circling the wagons if you can’t last?”

• Angela Rayner viewed Prince Andrew as a “nonce” and tried to stop him having the right to stand in for the king as a counsellor of state in the king’s absence, the book says.

• Dominic Cummings encouraged Jeremy Corbyn and his team to back Theresa May’s Brexit deal, the book says. It says that Cummings urged Corbyn to do this because he wanted Brexit to happen, and was not concerned that passing the May deal might split the Conservative party.

• Starmer hired a voice coach, who was designated a key worker at one point so she could help him during Covid. The Tories are suggesting this broke lockdown rules, but Labour denies that.

• Sue Gray, Starmer’s former chief of staff, excluded McSweeney from “accessing official papers and even using Downing Street teabags in a rift inside No 10” shortly after the election, the book says.

Polish PM Donald Tusk says he wants to have UK 'as close as possible to EU when it comes to security issues'

Donald Tusk, the Polish PM, and a former president of the European Council, has said that he wants to see the UK “as close as possible to the EU when it comes to security issues”. Poland currently holds the presidency of the EU and Tusk said it was his initiative to invite Keir Starmer to the dinner tonight.

This is what he said (in Polish) as he arrived this morning.

I am really keen that, regardless of Brexit and its consequences, to have the UK as close as possible to the EU when it comes to security issues, defence industry, and to find ways to eliminate or reduce barriers in trade between the UK and Europe.

Today is the moment to get as close as possible again.

Donald Tusk at the informal EU summit this morning. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

Here are two UK lobby journalists on President Trump suggesting the UK may be exempt from sanctions.

Brexiters are always keen to highlight Brexit bonuses whenever they can find one (which isn’t often), and Harry Cole from the Sun thinks this is a good example.

Amazing how many people are managing to point out Trump says UK can escape EU tariffs without mentioning the B word this morning!

Hugo Gye from the i says this shows that Starmer’s policy of sucking up to Trump seems to be paying off.

EU leaders arriving for their informal summit have been relatively robust in what they have been saying about President Trump and the threat of tariffs, For example, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said:

If we are attacked in terms of trade, Europe – as a true power – will have to stand up for itself and therefore react.

Jakub Krupa has all the detail on his Europe live blog.